repeat and fade

katarina garcia

I am not okay.

The thought haunts Luna like one of those earworm rhythms that slip out from under the rim of her drum snare or Rey’s bass and crawl into her mind during the thick of a band jam session. Between dusty memories of pain that look like joy and joy that now brings her pain, the earworm builds a nest for itself.

It chants in beat with her footsteps after the first of too many black coffees. It croons to her from nine to five when mindless meetings stretch further than chewing gum worn grey. It hums to the pitch of the whirring bus on the scenic Bellevue streets that once seemed like something out of a fairytale. She thinks she sees Rey in a bus that passes hers. She stares, then decides the figure has too wide a smile.

In the shower, the earworm echoes the musical theatre songs she used to sing to the water-streaked walls and steamed glass. She watches her distorted reflection and listens. The earworm’s voice is high and pure, like hers when she first started out, singing in Julie Andrews’ bright soprano before her bathroom mirror. Luna wonders if her voice always sounded so naïve, if that was why Rey hated it.

I am not okay, the earworm sings, bringing a throbbing ache to her head at times and an amused twist to her lips in others. She wonders what the band would say if she told them about it.

Put it in a song, she imagines Varun saying from the keys as he experiments with different tone effects. Alexei would noodle around on his cherry red Epiphone Riviera, and Riku would start improvising lyrics over it. Rey would lock eyes with her, and they’d find the rhythm together.

No, she wouldn’t tell them. The earworm is loud enough just in her head.

As the week wears on, the earworm settles into white noise. Luna hums harmonies to it as she drives to rehearsal, her voice gravelly and raw from the cigarettes Rey gave her that she keeps trying to quit. She twirls one in her fingers now, embracing its warmth as it burns her.

Art is born from pain, Nita, her brother, Santi, once told her in his lecture-voice before she started hitting things just to feel the vibrations. Pain makes you interesting.

When Santi ran off two years later without so much as a note, she condensed her tears into four minutes and thirteen seconds and sung it a cappella to dead-eyed regulars at Eke’s. After not so much as a drunken applause, she stormed over to the bar’s decrepit drum set and poured the rest of her tears into the most blissfully deafening noise she could create until the bartender kicked her out.

Out in the street, she hugged stolen drumsticks against her chest. They still buzzed with warmth, a feeble rebellion against the biting nighttime chill. The light from a streetlamp bounced off something on the grimy sidewalk by her feet. A penny.

Santi had always teased her for gasping when she’d found a coin. Dios mío, it’s the twenty-first century, Nita, he’d tell her. It’s not worth anything. Flushing, she would slip the coin into her pocket anyway. Her brother hadn’t understood that it wasn’t the penny’s worth that made it so precious, but its shine.

Since Santi had left, joy had been a penny on the gum-strewn sidewalk, too dear to do anything with but cradle in her hands and avoid thoughts of the grime. In the bar, rattling the earth with the drums, she’d felt the weight of a coin in her fist beside the drumstick. She resisted the urge to pluck the coin from the sidewalk.

The door swung shut behind her. A boy watched her, his hands in his scuffed jean pockets. He had unforgiving brows and red, red hair bright as a stoplight.

“You’re a shit singer,” he said.

Luna snorted.

They stood there for a few minutes, drinking in passing car lights. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Drums were good,” he said. “But your rhythm was off.”

“Thanks for the input, jackass,” she said.

“My friend has a drum set, but he can’t play for shit. You’re good, though. Really good.” He looked at her. “You should come try it out.”

“I’ve got places to be,” she said.

She wasn’t fooling anyone. He raised a brow. She wondered what sound his face would make if she hit it.

“I have a bass,” he added. “Alexei—that’s my friend—he can strum a few chords on the guitar.”

“Not interested.”

“Whatever.” He kicked the sidewalk penny from foot to foot and pulled something from his coat pocket. She heard the click of a lighter, caught the glint of a flame as he lit a joint.

He noticed her watching and held it out.

It was a ceasefire, an olive branch. He wasn’t nice, but he was honest, a trait in scarce supply among her friends those days.

She took the joint like a handshake, took a long drag.

He said, “I’m Rey.”

“Luna.”

Seven hours and several joints later, Luna’s hands were blistered from drumming and her ears were ringing. She lay on the floor beside Rey and Alexei as Julian Casablancas screamed “The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair” from the tower speakers.

“We’re going to be something,” she said.

She pulls the car into the parking garage, takes the keys out of the ignition, and sits there.

I am not okay, the earworm says.

She pushes herself out of the car and takes the elevator down to the basement. The studio is a patchwork quilt of memories. In places on the walls, the freshest coat of muted blue paint has been scraped off to reveal earlier shades of cloying yellow-green and rebellious fuchsia. The corner houses the half-built shelf Varun has procrastinated finishing for two years and the PA system he engineered himself. Beside that stands Rey’s rack of basses, which they call “the graveyard” because once he adds an instrument to it, he decides it’s “shit.” Riku’s box of earplugs and good luck charms sits on a table at the back because if anyone so much as brushes by it, he’ll storm out of the studio. Off to the side, there’s a hole in the wall that Alexei gives a different cover story for each time they ask.

One by one, the others arrive. Varun says an empty salutation, wanders to the keyboard, and starts playing with the controls. Riku comes next, scowling down at them through his designer sunglasses as he crosses the room to the mic. Luna doesn’t notice Alexei slip in, but now he’s in the corner, setting up his pedal board. Last, there’s Rey. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

There was a time when Varun would come into the studio ranting about his latest scientific obsession and launch into cheerful debates about jazz standards; when Riku laughed when he messed up a lyric and let them tease the slogans on his shirts; when Rey and Luna made silly faces at each other as they traded fours and Alexei made concerning jokes instead of just nodding hello and goodbye.

Luna wonders if Santi would have liked them. The brothers who took her in when hers had gone; a headache on the best of days and the only people she would want beside her on a battlefield.

She takes a seat on the drum stool. Everyone’s all set up, but no one is moving.

Riku sighs. “Just count down already, Luna.”

They play the song they’ve used to warm up for years, a cover of a ‘90s track that felt so clever when they first arranged it, when a studio sounded like shiny floors and LED lighting instead of a leak they couldn’t patch up and the faint smell of vinegar. Four years, and they’ve moved two floors down from a view of the sun.

She isn’t old enough to give up hope, but she’s too old to let herself believe wholeheartedly in something. And yet, hope is all she has. Even if it will break her heart.

I am not okay, says the earworm. She tells herself this at concerts, when all the eyes in the world are on her. If she loses the beat, it’s all over. She can’t fail, or she will die. She will die.

She and Rey play off each other, the pulse of the drums and bass two parts of the same whole. They are the sun and the moon, nothing without the other. When they’re playing, nothing else exists but the rhythm they share.

She doesn’t think about the last time they played outside this room. Doesn’t think about the rhythm slipping out of her hands, the deafening silence. The way Rey looked at her.

I am not okay, the earworm sings. She pounds it into submission and buries it somewhere in the rhythm, somewhere the others can’t see it.

They run through the track list they’ve been honing the past few months. In the middle of one, Riku calls for a pause. “We’re missing the mark. It’s not crisp.”

“Fucking Zeppelin wouldn’t sound crisp to you,” Rey says. “And enough with all that ‘we’ shit. You’re the one who’s racing ahead on the choruses.”

“No, you and Varun are taking too long on the chord changes.”

Rey scoffs. “Varun, you hearing this?”

The keyboardist shrugs. “We have room for improvement.”

Luna stiffens as Rey turns his gaze on her. “Back me up here.”

She knows the song’s current state is the best they’re going to get. She bites her tongue, and Alexei says nothing.

At the end of the rehearsal, they each pack up and rush out the door, as if there’s traffic to beat at nine p.m.

As she and Rey take the elevator, she fixes her gaze on the glowing buttons.

Luna feels his eyes on her. He says, “What’s wrong?”

His tone is indifferent, without a trace of his usual anger. That’s warmth, from him. Love she once would have done anything to bask in the flame of, that part of her still wants. She wants to punch him. She wants to hug him. Instead, she exits the elevator and makes a beeline for her car before she gets nauseous.

She doesn’t stop at any streetlights on the drive home. To her swimming vision, they all look green.

I am not okay. I am not okay. IamnotokayIamnotokayIamnotokay…

When she gets home, she can’t move. She can’t breathe. Her body’s emergency control system takes over, and her legs start towards the bathroom of their own volition.

In the shower, she sits on the floor. She can’t hear the earworm’s singing anymore. She doesn’t know if the water bathing her is from her tears or the faucet above.

She blinks, and she is in a memory.

Their last concert. The biggest crowd they’d ever seen. An opportunity, a true chance for success. Big names hid somewhere in the sea of faces, deciding whether to give the musicians a future.

The band started their opening song, ingrained into them like calluses.

There were so many eyes. People Luna hadn’t met, who didn’t know her, or Rey, or the rest of them. People who wouldn’t give them another chance, who didn’t care that this moment was everything to them.

Luna couldn’t breathe. Her hand slipped.

She lost the beat.

The aftermath comes to her now in flashes. The song collapsing into a cacophony until Riku finally lifted a hand and put it out of its misery. Stumbling through the rest of their set, their shoes finding a way into every possible pothole, everything off, like their songs distorted through a wineglass. Backstage, they bickered and bit until their throats were raw.

Before long, they moved on from finger-pointing and started digging deeper, where it hurt, where it scarred.

Luna cried at everyone to stop, stop-stop-stop, and tried to push Riku and Rey apart before anyone’s nose got bloodied. Someone threw a fist. The blow landed on her cheek, sent her stumbling back.

Everyone froze. They were a record everyone had heard too many times, and the needle was caught in a scratch. No one said they were sorry. No one offered to get her ice or asked if she was in pain.

She was always in pain. Art was born from pain, and pain made her interesting.

Riku raked a hand through his hair. “Fuck you, Rey.” He left the room and slammed the door behind him.

Varun shook his head and followed, avoiding everyone’s eyes. Alexei had disappeared long before.

Only Rey and Luna remained. Rey was angry, always angry, but for her, there was a softness to it. He didn’t give her much, but what he gave her, she made it last. She kept the looks he reserved for her in a little filigreed box in her mind and took them out when her heart was hurting. A smile from him filled her with cozy warmth in the cold. A laugh from him changed the season to summer. They were sol y luna, Rey and Luna, inseparable as their instruments. She knew the city through the streets she’d followed him down; the bar where the band they’d built together was in the same room for the first time; the person he’d turned her into.

He never stayed still for long. She was chasing after him, always, longing to earn his smile. Always one step behind, holding on too tightly, afraid that if she didn’t grasp hard enough, he’d leave her behind. She was the only person he let so close to him, she knew, but not close enough. He loved her, trusted her, in every way except the one she wanted.

She wondered if it had been his fist that had struck her. If the guilt would overcome his anger, and he would give her an apology, a remorseful look, pity, anything she could put in her box and hold on to.

Rey, his face as red as his hair, told her, “Sometimes, I can’t stand you. You can’t leave me alone. You’re always there, like some fucking mosquito.”

Her face was burning, but she felt cold. “But… I… you’re my person,” she said. “We’re a team. Sol y luna.”

Rey looked at her like when they’d first met, like she was a child. Like she wasn’t fooling anyone.

He snorted. “To you, maybe. You’re not my person.”

Part of her, a distant one untouched by the shock, wondered if the blow had been an accident at all. If he’d been yearning to hit her as much as she’d yearned to kiss him.

Inanely, she wanted to laugh. Hope was a poison, wasn’t it? Hoping for Rey to stop and see her, for fame to make it all worthwhile. Hope was unrequited love. It made her feel ugly and small, pressed its fingers against her throat and slowly suffocated her, but she couldn’t bear to separate herself from it. On the best days, it was the fantasy that fueled her to keep going; on the worst, it was a reminder of what she couldn’t have.

Always, she felt as if she were living on a precipice—one misstep, and she’d go tumbling down. She’d thought her own thoughtlessness would make her trip. Rey—firebrand, honest Rey, who’d taken a chance on a lonely kid and given her purpose—had gone ahead and given her a shove.

Curled up on the shower floor, she turns off the water.

Since their last concert, she’s been living a slow death. Repeat and fade. The copout ending bands use in recording studios when they don’t know how to end a song. Repeating the good part again and again as it gets further and further away from you, until it loses the magic that once gave it meaning.

She remembers how Rey looked at her after the rehearsal. How he asked her what was wrong.

“What’s wrong?” she says to the shower walls. “You hurt me, and you’re pretending nothing happened. And I am not okay.”

She is not okay. It didn’t start at the concert; it started before rehearsals became a hassle, before they all met at Eke’s and decided to give it a try, before she lay on Rey and Alexei’s floor and listened to the Strokes. It started with Rey outside Eke’s, offering her a joint and honesty that had seemed like salvation.

He gives her less than she would accept from anyone else, but it’s more than he gives anyone else, and she thought that made it okay. She knows he’s always caused her pain, but he didn’t ask for her to love him. He isn’t kind, has never been kind, so she doesn’t blame him for how he treats her. What they had was beautiful because it hurt, and art was born from pain.

But there are moments of joy, too. When everyone in the studio collaborates on a new song, shouts out ideas and experiments until they stumble upon something good, and everyone cries out, Again! Do that again!

Maybe art could be something else, something more than pain. Maybe life could mean something without the band. Without Rey.

She dries off and finds the phone she left on her kitchen counter. She opens the band group chat. Years ago, they would send memes to each other and clips of crazy guitar solos. When she scrolls up, all she sees are rehearsal time suggestions and thumbs ups.

She’s never liked to repeat and fade. She prefers a decisive ending, a crash of cymbals and then silence. She knows when a song has gone on for too long, when it’s time to let go.

She sends a text to the band: Eke’s, 8pm tomorrow. We need to talk.

Before she sets her phone down, it starts vibrating. Rey is calling her.

She takes a deep breath and doesn’t pick up.

In another season, another city, Luna drives her car out to a place she hasn’t been before. She rolls the windows down, breathes in the fresh autumn air, finds peace in the changing leaves. The earworm in her head today just hums, doesn’t say a word.

She sings as she drives. Her voice isn’t as strong as it once was, but it’s lost the gravel from the cigarettes, and after months of practice, she can hold a note, high and clear. The car’s passenger seat houses a stack of fliers with a smiling picture of her drumming on the front, advertising Thursday night jam sessions at a jazz club. Other musicians drift in and out of the jams like ships at a port, but she remains like a lighthouse. When they have a good rhythm going, they’re electric.

Outside the car window, she sees a line of trees in autumn blaze. She parks and gets out of the car. The sidewalk has been worn by a thousand shoes, and she joins their chorus.

Up ahead, the sun glints on something on the path. A penny on the sidewalk.

She kneels to pick it up.